Dr. Phil Show, Part 2

This post is a follow-up to yesterday's post on the Dr. Phil Show (entitled The Island of Constant Talkers.) You will want to read it first (here) if you want to understand what I am writing about.

Read it? Ok, here's the continuation. So Dr. Phil sent Jeni out to watch a bank of three television screens each featuring her talking (specifically, a film of her interviewing for the show.) They sat her at conversational distance away from each of the screens so that she could feel what it was like to be in a conversation with her. She immediately said she got it, but Dr. Phil said "I don't think you do" and then left her to continue watching while he talked with the woman who feared birds, the man who feared vegetables and the teenager who was obsessively in love with Joel Madden (of the band Good Charlotte, and also Nicole Ritchie's boyfriend.) Then he brought Jeni back out and asked her how listening to herself had felt. She said it was, in fact, exhausting to listen to her talking, just as her friends (and, I'm sure, others) had always said. Dr. Phil said what he had done was a combination of immersion therapy and social sensitization. He then called one of Jeni's friends and asked her to be ready to answer some follow-up questions when he called to see whether Jeni was improving.

I don't know what immersion therapy or social sensitization are; do you? Let's go to the web.

OK, so immersion therapy turns out to be this (gradually increasing levels of exposure to a feared object; a way of overcoming phobias.) What he did with Jeni seems to be more the opposite; levels of exposure to something she WAS comfortable with with the goal of making her uncomfortable with it (and to have insights about it.)

As for social sensitization, a web search didn't turn up anything that seemed relevant.

I hope Jeni will be able to benefit from her experience. Once I read that if you feel that when you start talking to a group of people the party really gets started, consider for a moment that they may have been perfectly happily talking about something else before you came up to them, and that even though they are laughing with you, they might actually see you as imposing on them and interrupting them. I thought this was a good point -- because I have felt that way, and I hadn't previously considered it from that point of view.

Meanwhile, the other stories were pretty interesting, too. One thing I liked about this particular episode is that these people seemed a bit more functional that the average Dr. Phil guest, and they all wanted to change (in fact, these were their New Years' resolutions.) There was a guy who seemed otherwise really sane but he hates vegetables. As it turns out, his parents are farmers or work at the farmer's market or something, and in his youth he had had to stand near a container of rotting vegetables and take the bad vegetables out there to be disposed of, and when he sees his wife eat a salad, in his mind he sees her eating garbage. Anyway, he managed to eat half a circle of zucchini. This inspired me to want to overcome my phobia of mayonnaise; luckily, however, change is less imperative in my case because mayonnaise is a less significant food group than vegetables. This (and the bird fear lady) reminds me of my sister-in-law who told me she couldn't touch a worm but she could look at a worm... maybe. (She said this in such a focused, thoughtful way that I count it as the funniest thing she's ever said. She eventually touched a worm, too.)

I used to be terribly repulsed by slugs. Well, one time I poured myself some bath water, got into the tub, saw what was on the side of the tub, and screamed! The apartment people had removed some mildewed-looking caulk, and hadn't put new caulk on, and a baby slug had crawled through the gap into the tub! Well, this wasn't the end of the story, because every morning I'd get up to take a shower and look into the tub to see whether a slug had come in. My boyfriend was a really nice person, and I'd wake him up to get the slug out of the tub and go put it out on the grass for me. Eventually it dawned on me that I was at least 1000 times bigger than a baby slug (not to mention faster, smarter, and better-looking) and I was perfectly able to scoop a slug up on a piece of toilet paper myself. Later on, I was even able to touch one, and now I am not scared of them anymore.

I'm going to mention Britney Spears as an experiment to see if I get a lot of search hits, because Dr. Phil and Britney Spears are in the news right now (he visited her when she was hospitalized overnight after refusing to give the boys back to Kevin.)

If you found this discussion of overtalking relevant, you may also be interested in Cindi's list of New Year's resolutions for 7s here.

The Island of Constant Talkers

Yesterday's Dr. Phil was about New Year's resolutions. Link here.

The first guest was Jeni, whose problem is that she talks constantly. Her mom said Jeni's been doing it since she learned to talk, and that if Jeni had been her first child, she'd only have had one. (!) Jeni says she's lost a job and several promotions over her talkativeness, that she rarely goes on any second dates, and that she is often late for appointments because she stops to talk with strangers in the street. Dr. Phil timed how long it took her to answer questions during the interview and compared it to the average length of time taken; I don't remember the specifics but there was quite a difference.

Dr. Phil had set up a buzzer for the interview and would hit the buzzer ("aaanh") when he felt Jeni had gone on long enough/answered the question/made her point. (He was a little quick on the buzzer in my opinion, actually.) Have you ever wished you could do that to someone? He asked her whether she had any idea why she was this way, and she said she had several theories. He asked her to give the short version of her strongest theory; she said she had ADD. Dr. Phil said he wasn't sure she had ADD, but he was pretty sure she had anxiety. He asked her whether she felt compelled to fill up any empty spaces in the conversation and she said she did. Phil said he thought she didn't perceive how the talking seemed from the outside, so his crew had filmed her talking and he sent her backstage to watch some of the footage, and then come back later after some other guests had appeared.

Jeni is a classic 7 (and she also seemed like maybe an ENFP -- she is clearly an EP, anyway.) I think a big hurdle with learning enneagram typing is trying to get the Gestalt of a type from words on a page; it took me a long time to realize (through induction) how talkative 7s usually are. And I believe that the 7s' talkativeness is understressed in the enneagram literature. To test this, I looked at the 7 description in Margaret Frings Keyes' Emotions and the Enneagram; it includes the sentence "They enjoy talk and entertaining gossip," but that's the only mention. The 1990 version of Understanding the Enneagram by Don Riso says of the average 7: "Begin to be hyperactive, throwing themselves into constant activity, doing and saying whatever comes to mind." and "Uninhibited, 'flighty,' flamboyant, outrageous, outspoken, loud and brash -- constantly talking, wisecracking, joking and 'performing' to stay in high spirits." (Italics mine.) Although it's there, I think it's underplayed in terms of how much it's talked about versus how much it's part of the 7s personality (from my observation.) I suppose I say this because it's a characteristic that is very apparent from the outside of a person. That being said, 7s usually have this trait to some degree, but many aren't nearly as bad as Jeni. Also, I would imagine that compulsive talking would increase as one goes down the levels of health. A couple of movies which showcase the talkative nature of the 7 personality are My Dinner With Andre and Big Fish.

I don't think Jeni is all that unusual in having been passed over for promotions because of this characteristic: overtalking gets really old for other people. In my experience, Jeni's most unusual characteristic is that she is seeking help for it. Cindi and I just had a discussion about this, and she pointed out that with many vices and character flaws you often hear the individual at least nod at wanting to change. Not so with overtalking, to the point that in some cases very direct statements such as "Let's talk about something else" or "I am tired of listening now" do not work, and neither do little employee "counseling" sessions on the job. I believe that Dr. Phil is onto something when he says Jeni is not in touch with how her behavior appears from the outside. As a 6w7 (and ENFP) myself, I can relate to how it feels differently from the inside -- it seems to you like everybody's having fun. Especially in my younger days, I felt very invested in being "interesting," and felt that having a lot to say was a marker for how interesting a person was.

I hope Jeni can get some help from the Dr. Phil show; she seems like a nice, and certainly a friendly, person. Overtalking is, at least on the surface, a well-meaning vice. I haven't watched the end of the show, and I haven't yet found out what happens when Jeni watches the tapes. I'd like to see some good advice given because I truly do think this problem is holding some good people back. I believe the enneagram answer would be learning to calm down rather than to develop self-control per se; I think Dr. Phil might be headed in that direction as well with his statement about Jeni's anxiety and I look forard to seeing what he has to say (and will report tomorrow.)

The title of this post, The Island of Constant Talkers, refers to the reality show Cindi and I are pitching in which we put all these people on an island together. (Go ahead and steal this idea.) Cindi also shared an interesting anecdote from the life of Rod Serling (she read his biography.) Apparently, he was one of these non-stop talkers. His family (when he was a kid) got together and decided not to talk to Rod during the whole car ride. I guess they were trying out various strategies, and thought maybe talking back only encouraged him. The strategy failed, however, and he talked non-stop all the way up and all the way back, and very likely didn't notice that they weren't talking.